Notes towards an edX / Coursera comparison

A I wrote elsewhere, three major platforms seem to occupy much of the MOOC landscape: Udacity, Coursera, and edX. I've been meaning to do a write-up of my various impressions of the platforms based on the courses I've taken or am taking (counting the ones I've dropped, that's something like 15 on edX-based platforms, 6 on Coursera, and 1 on Udacity). Doing this write-up will take a while though, because I want it to be as good as I can make it; which will probably mean taking more courses, too.

In the meantime, I want to gather my thoughts, and sort of draft the main ideas I want to include in the final write-up.

Introducing the players

I'll mostly talk about edX and Coursera; I haven't really got enough to say about Udacity, and the model is different enough that it's not too easily compared to the other two. A few words of introduction though:

Coursera and Udacity are both commercial companies tracing their roots to Stanford University in California. Coursera has taken most of the limelight, gathering $85 million in funding and a very wide portfolio, over 600 courses, usually (but not exclusively) online versions of courses offered by various universities around the globe. Since they are commercial startups, a lot of the discussion around them revolve around business plans, licencing agreements, etc. Their models are different: Coursera is closer to classical university courses, with a predefined schedule, lectures, homework, etc. Udacity courses are offered on a subscription basis: you can take them whenever you like and take however much time you need, with a monthly fee.

In contrast, edX is a nonprofit organization. Its origins are at MIT, which was quickly joined by Harvard. It is governed by the edX Consortium, comprising the two founding institutions plus a large number of organizations (mostly, but not only, academicals).

Courses at edX are mostly organized in the same way as Coursera's, with predefined schedules and so on. A few courses are available on a self-paced basis, though.

Note that “edX” can have multiple meanings: either it is the edX organization itself, or the edX software that powers the platform. The latter is free and open source, and in wide use by multiple organizations, such as France Université Numérique (the French MOOC platform) or MongoDB University. Interestingly, it seems that Google is a contributor to the OpenEdX platform, and that Stanford (from where both Coursera and Udacity have originated) has also put its weight behind it.

Institutions

Coursera has by far the widest course catalog, more than 600, from many places around the world. They seem to have a great deal of partners in the US state university systems, in Australia, in China, etc. but also from Europe (hello, Centrale Paris!), which is a feat. Partners are mostly universities, but there are a handful of non-universities as well, like the World Bank and the National Geographic society.

Topics covered by the courses are extremely varied, and range from advanced mathematics to “do you have what it takes to become a vet?” Chances are good that, if you are interested in a topic, you will find a relevant course on Coursera.

Udacity seems to have refocused on hands-on professional training built in partnership with companies (Google, Facebook, etc. have all classes on Udacity), although there are a few university-sponsored courses too.

edX courses come from its partners, first and foremost MIT, Harvard and UC Berkeley. Presently, most courses seem to come from American institutions, although that's changing, with courses from India, Latin America, Japan, Australia, coming on. Europeans are lagging a bit: the edX powerhouses seem to be TU Delft (Netherlands) and Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). Overall, I think it's something like 175 courses that are offered on edX; generally, you will find introductory courses in about any subject, but more advanced courses are sometimes lacking (unless you're in IT).

Software

Coursera's software is very polished. It is quite obvious where all the funding has gone: the platform is very easy to use, it's simple to browse through the catalog to find interesting courses, one can “watch” courses for upcoming sessions, the platform itself does some simple analytics to suggest courses, etc. There are even mobile applications for iOS and Android which allow students to download lectures and watch them at their leisure, something which is extremely handy for people like me who watch lectures while commuting to work.

Course delivery is also quite polished, it's fast, there are few or no bugs, but I kind of dislike the layout. It's organized by activity type, so you have separate menu entries for lectures, quizzes, peer-reviewed assignments, surveys, etc.; each of these pages will have content added to it as course segments are released. On the one hand, students are free to organize themselves, although it seems to me that they'll just go through the elements sequentially (first watch all the lectures in one go, then browse the required readings, then take the quizzes, etc.) On the other hand, it's messier, I feel, and it makes it harder to keep track of what's to be done at which time, and in what order.

The course dashboard helps: some courses have counters on it recapping activities (“you have watched 16 out of 23 lectures”). Interestingly, the latest/most active forum threads are summarized on the dashboard too, so it feels more like the “course hub” that it's supposed to be.

Course activities seem to be limited to lectures, readings, quizzes and peer-reviewed assignments. It may be because I didn't take too many courses − I suppose programming courses have support for sandboxes, for instance. But generally, I find the “work” part of Coursera courses rather disappointing: it's often limited to checking boxes in quizzes.

By contrast, edX feels a lot more open-sourcey[1], very flexible but rough at the edges. It may be that they just haven't had as much money to invest in the software as Coursera have; being a non-profit funded by universities, they're unlikely to have $85 million to spend. So the “home site” experience is far from as good. Browsing through the catalog is a mostly-manual chore (there's no search engine, just categories). The student dashboard is a shambles. You have to keep track of what courses start when manually (I use a spreadsheet…), same for deadlines.

The course experience however is a lot better. The courseware is organized linearly, mixing blocks of various nature. So you can, and do, have lecture sections interspersed with knowledge-checks, followed by worked examples, practice problems (which can be of any type), then homework assignments. Lectures are still lectures and so, a mostly passive experience, but the homework can be basically anything: quizzes, formula input (with a nice MathJax integration), advanced interactive tools (7.00x had us cross fruit flies in order to produce populations with a specific phenotype), code execution (CS169x ran unit tests on our code to check its compliance), etc. This makes for a much, much richer learning experience.

The edX forum software sucks big time, but it has a redeeming quality: it's possible for course designers to embed discussion forums in courseware pages, thereby fostering discussion of the topic under scrutiny.

The overall feeling that I have is that course designers have a lot more latitude with edX, when Coursera has more of a “one size doesn't quite fit all” approach. That, and the fact that edX courses tend to come from higher-profile institutions (MIT, Harvard, Berkeley…) that may have more effort to invest in a particular course, means that as a rule of thumb, I go to edX first and only fall back to Coursera when I can't find what I need / want on edX.

[1] disclaimer: I am a big open-source user and advocate. I'm typing this from a Linux Mint desktop.